A Ticket to Ride the Express Through the Valley of Cares

If I’d had any doubts that I was crossing into a different culture, they were dispelled at the Burbank Metrolink station’s automatic ticket machine.

After I slid a $20 bill into the slot for a $4.50 round-trip ticket to Sylmar / San Fernando, the machine gave me as change two quarters--and 15 Susan B. Anthony dollars.

I don’t believe I’ve seen 15 Susies all in one place before. They’re still legal tender, right?

In any case, their weight and bulk in my jeans pocket served as a kind of talisman during a day of riding the rails up and down and across the San Fernando Valley. They kept me mindful that I’d entered an unusually calm reality within the familiarly fitful one.

The Valley, which owes its very existence as part of the Los Angeles megalopolis to the automobile, appeared very different from a train. Its people, too, seemed other than what they seem from behind the steering wheel of a Toyota frozen in a vigil before a left-turn arrow that refuses to turn green.

I’m not one of the nearly 27,000 Southern Californians who travel on Metrolink’s commuter trains each workday. In fact, I’d never ridden Metrolink before. Like the vast majority of Americans, I’m almost never on a train, so the experience probably made more of an impression on me than it does on those who ride every day.

Nothing in automobile travel, for instance, compares to the anticipation with which you stand on the station platform, peering down the tracks, trying to conjure the headlight of your train. Standing there squinting, you become conscious of a dot of brightness as far away as you can see. You suspect it’s purely volitional because it doesn’t move. Or maybe it’s just the sun reflecting off some shiny object.

Then, at length, the dot seems to shimmer minutely and become more insistent in its brightness, and then it begins to float and expand. Finally, you hear a distant, mournful wail, and the light becomes affixed to the shuddering bulk of a station-hungry train.

Waiting for a left-turn arrow just doesn’t hold the same poetry.

I rode up-Valley and back on the Santa Clarita Line, and, for six more Susan B. Anthonys, cross-Valley and back on the Ventura County Line. Both trains were modernly appointed, with airline-type seats and muted carpeting and paint. They were quiet, too, subject only to the murmuring of the climate control system and the soft thrum and wobble of the cushiony suspension as it devoured track. And no seat belts required.

To ride in the upper decks was to feel kind of lordly. As we glided along, tall trackside oleander bushes caught in our artificial head wind nodded as though in homage. Lines of lowly automobiles behind lowered gates deferred to us at every crossing.

We were immune to the rules and spasticity of rubber-wheeled traffic, moving at a steady, stately 45 mph through all the self-created obstacles of the car culture. We made Burbank from Chatsworth at rush hour in less than 30 minutes, stopping at three stations along the way.

From the tracks, you get a rare view of the industrial sinew that binds and strengthens Valley suburbiana. Light industry turns a prettified face to the street. To the railroad tracks, it shows its workaday backside:

Stacks of wooden skids, lumber and baled newspaper; great mounds of dirt, sand, gravel and cardboard; giant trash bins and hoppers; storage yards for Coca-Cola vending machines and coin-operated kiddie carousels; a resting fleet of dark green garbage trucks; a lot full of extension-bucket trucks, their cherry pickers raised high as though in salute; and wrecking yards--acres upon acres of the automotive dead--discreetly hidden from the view of their descendants on the clogged roadways.

Only the graffiti on buildings and corrugated steel fences purposely seek the eyes of train travelers.

As the train from Chatsworth made its way toward Burbank near 5 p.m., there was a surrealistic stillness along the tracks. Although the rush-hour furor on the freeways was just congealing, work at these trackside industrial sites had already ended for the day.

As the train rolled east of the Northridge station, a pair of slightly guilty-looking adolescent boys drew away from the tracks. About the only sign of human activity visible, they were up to God-knows-what, the forbidden appeal of a railroad right of way to boyish adventurousness being an age-old tale.

Of all the ways in which the collectivist experience of train-riding differs from the abject individualism of car-driving, the most interesting is this: There is plenty of opportunity to study one’s fellow travelers, and, if you’re of a mind, to construct fairly complicated personalities and lives for them.

There they sit, or stand in the station--the determined-looking young man who paces to and fro with his hands clasped behind his back, the insouciant-seeming woman who has kicked off her aerobic high tops and is sprawled in her seat with the New York Times. Interesting. Nonthreatening. Going about their unique lives. Worthy of consideration.

So unlike the fleeting encounters with people on the roadway. When in the stressful isolation of your car, you’re likely to turn the woman in the Land Rover behind you into a selfish purveyor of brainless entertainment who probably deserves a bad case of shingles, or the man in the old car who just cut in front of you into an uninsured motorist who has driven up all our premiums.

All of which leads me to two questions:

If you could take the train to and from work every day instead of drive, why wouldn’t you?

And, what am I supposed to do with these nine Susan B. Anthony dollars I have left?